Algor Mortis
by lifeundecided
Summary: She sits up at night and pores over old plans of the house and he thinks that if she could pull its foundations from under it she would.


_Author's note: I'm on a one shot run. This is post-canon, but like most, with a minuscule re-imagining: Croatoan was never a thing, was never a flop. Tiny 'The Craft' reference. Teeny tiny._

There are things he likes about the house. Like the almost bloodstains, and the crawlspace that only smells faintly of damp, and the shutters on the windows of his old room, that never seem to change colour, never seem to fade or chip or gather dust. He likes the mural in the living room and the clean tiles in the kitchen and the old rocking chair in the basement that makes him him feel like a child again. He likes the locks that stick fast or slide open with a scraping sound depending on how you turn the handle, and the thick walls, that the realtor who appears from time to time in various shades of salmon pink says are characteristic of a house this old.

He likes the things that dampen the sound and block out light and keep her safe, above all. From her mother's screams and the sight of her father stumbling home at sunrise with lipstick marks on his neck, from the sight of Moira in suspenders and the foul words her parents throw at one another when the sun goes down and the sheets are pulled back and the contents of a bathroom cabinet become projectiles. There are three loose floorboards under her bed and a false bottom to her bedside cabinet and twelve pairs of lace panties in a cardboard box that she never had any intention of unpacking, tried and failed to leave behind or have fall off the back of a removal van. No use to him, since there are still tags on eleven of them; the other is soaked in blood from what he only assumes is a cut on her thigh.

Circles under her eyes and sharp hipbones and greyhound ribs tell him that her depression is more clinical than poetical. She's lethargic and her skin is always cold, even bundled in ugly sweaters that may or may not be his. Even folded against his chest, cold hands pressed against the pulsing heat in his neck, her heart seems slow, veins frozen, starting to thaw and waiting to burst like pipes in the spring.

Old habits are dying, dead, soft and slow and fading, a smothered candle that glows blue before giving up and shrinking back to nothing in a plume of waxy smoke.

She doesn't eat like she used to or shower in the middle of the night like she used to, to piss off her parents and make the plumbing groan. She doesn't try to sneak him in through the basement, or jump when he appears, uninvited, in her bed.

When he finds her talking shop with Moira about boundaries it sounds like an introductory chapter from the handbook for the recently deceased and he appreciates her creativity when it comes to getting her parents out of the house. Hayden's pinned down and her eyes cross in a fog of ether. Charles has confident, shaking hands digging around in her bulging stomach and Violet struggles to keep baby Harmon-McClaine fully formed and suture free.

Ben hits his oldest daughter with his car in the haste to make it out of the house with as much of his ever growing, ever dying brood as possible and the EMT who bags the body and presses the ambulance door closed with a reverential bow of his head is tall and blond and Vivien doesn't recognise him outside of his creative role as heavy lifter trailing behind his bitter queen of a husband.

There is no funeral because there is no money and no corpse and no time when Ben finds his wife swimming in a pool of amniotic fluid.

Violet's eyes are darker than before and when her bedroom goes up in flames and vodka she sits outside the door sipping and smoking and whispering about purification and insurance claims.

There are no more blood-soaked floorboards in his old bedroom and he feels somewhat weaker without a memento of who he used to be. She's begun sleeping in the basement when she's bored of wrinkled fingers and soap suds. She boxes up Charles' menagerie of horrors and starts researching how to speed up the decomposition of a corpse. Apparently quicklime is bullshit but she tries multiple concotions on the body that used to be hers before feeding her bleach soaked flesh to neighbourhood strays and nudges them out of the gate when they start to whine and froth at the mouth.

She's flushing the house out.

Billie Dean rings the doorbell on a Friday morning and Violet offers herbal tea and red wine and some sort of liqueur that matches her nails. The psychic tells her she heard the calls and Violet fiddles with the pasta arm. She whispers that there have been no such calls and Billie Dean explains that the kind of turbulence Violet has caused, is causing, will cause, is causing ripples.

The meat grinder in the basement is carefully dismantled with three screwdrivers and Hayden stops complaining about Hugo's wandering hands. Tate sits at the top of the stairs and eavesdrops and it clicks and he wonders why he's not already gone.

Billie Dean pockets a carving knife on her way out and Violet says nothing because Ms. Howard's words are of more use to her than silver. When Violet fills a bucket with salt water and moves to cut Beau's chain her lips turn blue and there are flecks of rust on her neck when she wakes.

He'll let her burn the crib and melt the tea set that hides under a bed in what used to be the nursery. She sits up at night and pores over old plans of the house and he thinks that if she could pull its foundations from under it she would.

The house cannot stop her because without its puppets, of which numbers are dwindling, it is simply a house. It whispers to him in the night and his insides go fuzzy when he remembers all that the house has done for him. He kills Violet a couple of times in listless ways without much enthusiasm because he knows the house is losing its battle against this fierce little girl.

She knows that the house itself is just a house; Billie Dean's theories about negative energies are anchored in objects and memories. A house is a house is a house. A girl is so much more. She's stopped wearing so many clothes because layers get in the way of hard labour and she slits her wrists when she's too exhausted to wait for sleep to take her. Sometimes she fucks him with impatience and a look in her eyes that tells him he's both stress release and a nuisance.

Selfishness for the sake of selfishness has become her thing and she steals all the bedding from the six bedrooms of the house and makes herself a padded cell two doors down from the kitchen. Moira has not cleaned a thing in years because Violet tells her she's not doing it right and when she fucks her with long nails Violet spits out that she's out of practice and she'd struggle to make a pubescent boy come.

So does Violet because she's Violet and to be frank she's never cared about him getting his because she's read all the Cosmo articles about female empowerment and understands that he's a boy and her interest or concern is not strictly necessary, just her cunt.

Billie Dean appears more and more often and as summer nears she starts to acknowledge his presence. She gets drunk and when Violet takes a sledgehammer to the bathtub she falls asleep on a chaise lounge in what used to be Constance's boudoir. Tate whispers in her ear and wonders what she did to get her so-called powers. When her voice in his head tells her that she's been clairvoyant since birth he can't resist a whispered, 'Maybe it's Maybelline.'

He slits her throat and ruins the family heirloom Constance had shipped from Virginia instead of paying for a month's worth of Beau's medication.

When Billie Dean wakes cracks appear in the ceiling. Violet smirks and pats him on the back. The east wing of the house collapses and Violet sulks for a week about the loss of her mattresses.

There are five of them left and she's losing steam.

He finds his guns under the kitchen sink and wonders why she's saving him for last. Violet empties all the liquor in the house down a drain on Halloween and throws the fireplace poker in the sea. Billie Dean's tarot cards are sold to a backstreet store and the softly spoken Spanish woman behind the counter gives her twice what they are worth and a look that tells Violet she knows exactly what she is and what she is doing. She lets herself pass through a group of teenage girls on her way out and remembers the poison of adolescence.

"I come bearing gifts," is the line she drops when she walks through the door with smeared lipstick and salt in her hair, kisses him with slack lips and presses coke and candy into his hands, makes his dick twitch because he's a material boy.

Her hands shake and she fumbles with his belt and looks like she'll vomit all over his dick, he thinks about picking chunks out of his pubic hair and marvels at how strong his stomach is, has to be, when he was raised by a woman with half a head and carelessly fucked from time to time by his brother that nobody talks about and gets his kicks from sloshing knee deep in blood, Macbeth style.

She's wearing lace panties that do little to cover her skin and leave little to the imagination, his fingers are in her hair and she glares at him because she's never appreciated being told what to do.

She daubs coke onto her gums and her tongue, licks the head of his dick and lets him do a line off the flat expanse of her stomach.

He's high when she offers him a suicide pact and he struggles to understand and laughs.

She pulls out the last of his guns and the last of her blades and explains through the haze of white powder that there's significance in it, just like her methodical destruction of the house's inhabitants over the years. She's been hoisting up anchors whether they like it or not, and he explains with a numb tongue that what waits for him is worse than an eternity in this house.

Violet strokes his cheekbones and the tip of his nose and smiles.

She tells him she can't do it on her own.

That if he really loved her he wouldn't make her do it herself.

He leans in for a kiss.

She shoots him in the heart.


End file.
